Watch the Write-Ins
Biden is not on the New Hampshire ballot, so interest on the Democratic side turns to the write-ins
President Joe Biden is not on the New Hampshire ballot.
PBS has a good explainer as to why. In a nutshell, the Democratic Party decided that small, non-diverse states like Iowa and New Hampshire were not representative of their party’s coalition and thus decided to promote South Carolina and Nevada to the front. Iowa Democrats complied by moving their party’s caucus to March 5th, even if the Republicans held theirs on January 15th.
New Hampshire Democrats couldn’t move their primary without the state changing the primary date. For this, they needed Republicans to join them in passing a new law. Not surprisingly, New Hampshire Republicans didn’t help. Democrats could have run a caucus or party-run primary, but that is expensive, so they decided to stick with the primary date, even if it meant losing delegates to the national convention. Plus, they wanted to protest New Hampshire losing their first-in-the-nation primary status, a symbolic meaningless protest in a year where Biden will be the nominee.
Biden decided to skip formally placing his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot, out of respect for the DNC’s decision. However, opportunistic candidates like Dean Phillips are on the ballot, have been campaigning, and have — true to form — gotten free media coverage in the vacuum of an absent Biden campaign.
There is no way Phillips will be the Democratic nominee, even if he performs well in New Hampshire without Biden on the ballot. If for no other reason, he will get trounced in South Carolina, which is how Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020 after losing Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden allies wish to avoid an embarrassing defeat, even if he’s not on the ballot, by belatedly running a write-in campaign for him. This is possible in Hew Hampshire voters can write in any name they choose, they are not limited to official write-in candidates like some other states have where write-in candidates have to qualify to have election officials tally their votes, or no write-ins are allowed.
There’s another campaign for voters to write-in “ceasefire” but this is worthless since election officials only tally votes for humans, not concepts or policy positions.
So what will happen? Will the Biden write-in campaign defeat Phillips? Who knows? It’s all symbolic in any case. Likely it will, but turnout will likely be very low. The last time an incumbent Democratic candidate ran in New Hampshire, only sixty thousand people voted in the Democratic primary. (My apologies for linking to Wikipedia, but unfortunately the New Hampshire Secretary of State choose this time to upgrade their website and the 2012 primary election results are not on it yet.)
There’s another interesting curiosity that happened in 2012. Republican candidates combined won ten percent of the vote in the Democratic primary! Ron Paul led with way with 2,289 votes, followed closely by Mitt Romney with 1,814. What gives?
New Hampshire is a semi-open or semi-closed primary state, depending on how you see your glass of water. No Party Affiliates (NPA, (or as they call them in New Hampshire “undeclared” voters) may change their party affiliation on the day of the primary to choose which party’s primary they wish to vote in. The catch is that if they do not switch their party back to NPA, then they lose that option in the future. This perk is available only to NPAs.
Every time a New Hampshire presidential primary rolls around, some voters are surprised to learn they are registered with a party and can’t vote in the more interesting contested race, which this year is arguably the Republican primary. These voters then decide to cast their ballot for their preferred candidate in the other party’s primary even if it doesn’t count.
We will likely see a few Biden votes in the Republican primary since the Democratic primary was the more interesting election in 2020. I would not be surprised at all if he beats at least one candidate that appeared in a Republican debate.
We will also see votes for former President Donald Trump and his remaining serious challenger Nikki Haley in the Democratic primary. Now, I do not expect these to be consequential, but there is a remote chance if the Republican primary is very close that these votes — if added to the candidate totals — could change the order. If I were to guess, in this totally weird scenario, Haley will get more write-in votes in the Democratic primary because these party switchers tend to be moderates.
In this scenario, the Democratic write-ins probably wouldn’t matter much to the narrative because Haley would need to greatly beat the polling expectations to have an extremely close Republican primary election.
Perhaps more amusing would be if Trump or Haley beat Phillips in the Democratic primary.